How Namely Scaled a Successful Sales Team

A company develops a great solution. It establishes a strong market fit. The business begins to grow. Fast.

Life is good.

Well, mostly. That’s because rapid success can present its own set of challenges. Let Chris Flores, insides sales manager at Namely, explain.

“As Namely established itself as the leader in the HR-payroll industry, we found ourselves with an awesome problem,” Flores said. “We had too many leads.”

While that was truly awesome, it also was still a vexing problem. The team at Namely faced the throbbing headache of efficiently processing that bounty of leads – continuing to fuel growth. And in a new webinar, Flores and marketing analyst Jason Feng explained the pivotal role that LeanData played in creating order for the lead-assignment process. In “How Namely Doubled Their SDR Team to Scale Sales,” the pair explained how LeanData is helping make their Account-Based Sales Development strategy a success.

Chris Flores

“I’m a big fan of service as a software — not software as a service,” Flores said. “And LeanData’s service is an example of that.”

And Namely, a startup that provides customers with all-in-one human resource solutions, understands the importance of service. It’s why the company with the “HR for Humans” catchphrase has been growing by leaps and bounds. Namely doubled its customer base last year and now works with about 400 companies and 60,000 employees globally.

By early 2015, though, that expansion was becoming a strain on the sales team, which utilizes account-based strategies. For Namely, that means Sales Development Representatives are responsible for starting conversations with prospects within target accounts. The SDRs have a dual role of handling both inbound leads and performing outbound prospecting.

But those sales reps also found themselves becoming overwhelmed with the busy work of researching and manually reassigning all those leads. As unconverted inbound leads piled up in their system, the team’s response time began to lag. Flores said there was a concern that hot opportunities were growing cold without prompt follow-up — or sometimes weren’t even getting to the right rep.

“As we scaled, it all ended up being a big pain point for us,” Flores added. “Account-Based Sales Development is about creating a visibility throughout the entire account. When leads are coming in, it’s important to have something that can automatically match them to accounts. Anything that eliminates that manual work is good from an SDR perspective.”

LeanData became the pain-reliever. It accomplishes that by ensuring that inbound leads always end up with the correct account owner and aligns the entire sales team when doing outbound prospecting, Feng said. “We really needed to coordinate our communications,” he added. “We wanted only one owner per account. We didn’t want four reps in the same account.”

Here’s how LeanData automates the Namely lead-assignment process.

When An Inbound Lead Comes into Namely

If it matches an existing account with an opportunity, LeanData automatically converts the lead into a contact and associates it both with the opportunity and the account.

If it matches an account without an existing opportunity, LeanData reassigns the lead to an SDR.

If it doesn’t match an existing account, LeanData round-robins the lead across the Namely SDR team.

Aligning Outbound Prospecting

When Namely SDRs are prospecting, they often need to determine if another rep “owns” a promising account. “When our SDRs are doing outbound prospecting and they come across a new lead that is part of an existing account, LeanData essentially shows the reps that this is somebody you can prospect or somebody you can’t prospect,” Feng said.

Jason Feng

The ability to round-robin leads is especially important, Feng added, because the Namely system is complicated. The sales team has seven regions, two different intent behaviors (demo request and content download) and two segments based on company size.

“We need 28 different round-robins,” Feng explained. “LeanData allows us to do things that we couldn’t have ever done manually. We need to round-robin leads because it’s important to make sure that SDRs are getting an equal number of leads of similar quality. We worked with LeanData to build that out and ensure that all the SDRs are being treated fairly and have a good shot at meeting their quota every month.”

Any changes in the workflow can be implemented within a couple of days by the LeanData customer success team, Feng added.

Meanwhile, because all of an account activity is bundled in one place, sales reps have the proper context to focus on what they do best – sell. At Namely, SDRs use the sales automation tool ToutApp to begin engaging key stakeholders in the highest value accounts through a strategic cadence of emails and calls. The result is a more efficient, faster sales cycle that concentrates on adding new business.

“It’s been a big improvement for us,” Flores said of using LeanData. “It gets the job done.”

Today, the Namely team has grown to 13 SDRs. And the business continues to grow.. Namely recently announced that it had raised an additional $30 million in venture capital.